The Xience stent, a flexible metal-mesh tube coated with the drug everolimus, has recently been used in it’s first real-life trial and according to Dutch cardiologists, it is performing incredibly well.

Though the product was approved by the FDA last July, the effectiveness of the new stent in “complex, unselected patients treated in daily practice still remains unknown and cannot be extrapolated from these randomized controlled trials,” said cardiologists at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam in their report, which was released online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. “We therefore sought to evaluate the impact of this second-generation drug-eluting stent on the clinical outcomes in consecutive patients treated in a real-life, all-comer population.”

The trial, which involved nearly 650 people, compared the outcomes of those given the new stent with others who had received bare metal stents or another type of coated stent. The result: in a sixth month follow up period, the incidence of death, heart attack and stenosis was lower in the Xience group.

The Xience V stent is made by Abbott Vascular and the company will continue to track performance using a data bank that incorporates more than 5,000 recipients.